Powerful rifle easily available

There are some who say gun control measures do nothing to stem gun violence; that such legislation is merely political strategy aimed at undermining Second Amendment rights.

If that is your position, consider this.

Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old man, who killed 20 first-graders and six educators in a Newtown elementary school, perpetrated that massacre with a Bushmaster XM15-E2S semi-automatic, a .223-caliber rifle, using several 30-round magazines, according to information released by the authorities yesterday.

If the 1994 ban on assault weapons, which was allowed to expire in 2004, was still in effect the Bushmaster XM15-E2S would have been one of its targets, and 30-round magazines would have been prohibited.

Could Lanza still have gotten hold of this rifle and the high capacity magazines?

Perhaps.

But if he did, he would have had to obtain them illegally, and if the enhanced background checks that President Barack Obama is now advocating had been in effect then, he would have had to work really hard to secure both the rifle and the ammunition.

“… If there is a step we can take that will save just one child, just one parent, just another town from experiencing the same grief that some of the moms and dads who are here have endured, then we should be doing it,” Mr. Obama said Thursday at the White House.

He was joined by parents whose lives have been touched by gun violence, including Katerina Rodgaard, a lawyer and a dance teacher who spoke about losing one of her dance students in the Virginia Tech massacre.

“After losing Reema and seeing the horror at Sandy Hook, my reaction was that I no longer felt it was safe to raise a family in this country,” Ms. Rodgaard, the mother of two young children, said in introducing the president. “I felt I either needed to leave the country or do something. As an attorney, I vowed to do something, because I feel that my rights to feel safe in this country and the rights of our children to feel safe in this country are paramount and worth fighting for.

Mr. Obama noted that Congress will soon be deciding whether to require “universal background checks for anyone who wants to buy a gun, to place tough new penalties on those who buy guns and then sell them to criminals, and to keep “weapons of war and high capacity magazines” off the streets.

“None of these ideas should be controversial,” the president said.

“Why wouldn’t we want to make it more difficult for a dangerous person to get his or her hands on a gun? Why wouldn’t we want to close the loopholes that allow 40 percent of all gun purchases to take place without a background check?

“Right now 90 percent of Americans support background checks, more than 80 percent of Republicans agree, more than 80 percent of gun owners agree.”

But as the president went on to note, “ there are some powerful voices on the other side that are interested in running out the clock, of changing the subject or drowning out the majority of the American people to prevent any of these reforms from happening at all.”

It doesn’t make sense that a troubled young man like Adam Lanza would be allowed access to a Bushmaster, which is a civilian version of the military M16 category rifles. It doesn’t make sense that he was firing bullets that met the military standard of being able to penetrate steel helmets at 500 yards. Over 150 spent .223 shell casings were found at the scene of the Newtown massacre.

It doesn’t make any sense at all that there are people still objecting to placing reasonable civilian controls on these weapons of war.